DESTINATION DREAMLIFE
We like travels Byron Bay
Okay, let’s go! Spontaneously, Pris and her boyfriend Arnaud plan a short trip from Bali to Byron Bay in Australia. Just a quick inspiration trip before they fly to the Netherlands to celebrate Christmas with family. Eve and fiancé Stephen are already in Amsterdam and fully in the Christmas spirit.
Byron Bay has been on our travel bucket list for years. Eef has been to Australia before, but Pris never. Super excited, we board the plane to discover Byron Bay and the Gold Coast for a few days. With Jetstar, it’s just a five-hour flight to Brisbane, and since we leave in the evening at eleven, we can comfortably fall asleep and wake up in Australia. The life!
We rented a car and drive to Byron in two hours. We pass the Gold Coast with popular surf spots like Snapper Rocks and Burleigh Heads. Here we will enjoy surfing for the last two days of our trip, but first, on to Byron.
If you’ve been following us for a while, you know that our love for food, coffee, and beautiful white beaches is really at the top of the list. And of course, we love to share that with you.
In Byron, you really find the cutest cafes with amazing interiors. Our days are filled with café hopping, haha. They have delicious coffee and super tasty, well-filled acai bowls in all shapes and sizes. High on caffeine, because we have to try the coco cappuccino everywhere (yep, coffee addicts, haha). We seriously tasted every acai bowl at every café that offers them. Not only very tasty, but also super inspiring for Arn, who has Bali Bowls, an acai and smoothie bowl café in Biarritz. A few of our faves in a row:
General Store:
Mega delicious coffee, but also really a ‘pinnable café’ where you just want to live. Read: a nomad, gypsy kinda vibe.
Top Shop:
A super cute, family-friendly café on the corner of a residential area. We are in love with the red and white polka-dotted umbrellas from Sunday Supply Co., with whom we also collaborated in 2016 when they just released their first umbrellas. They are so cute!
Folk:
A hippie café with a modern twist. They have very tasty rosella ice tea and warm banana cake. So good! The café is filled with beautiful plants and super nice wooden chairs and tables. It feels like you’re drinking tea in the woods.
The Farm:
Feels like home. A mega large farm where we had the best salad ever. Everything is organic and grown around the restaurant. The taste, the ingredients, the experience… picture perfect! You can buy the most beautiful flowers, the tastiest bread, and you can have fun shopping for Christmas gifts.
We seriously have beach FOMO, haha, so we really visited all the beautiful beaches that we got as tips from our friends. Beach days are the best days. The Pass is a stretched white beach with a mermaid pool/sandbar. It’s one of the most beautiful beaches with a mega good point break. Perfect for longboarding, and you can really catch kilometers of waves. Heaven!
Wategos:
Super laid-back and a beautiful beach. It was a bit busier here than at the other beaches, but still amazing for us. Nice walking, swimming, catching little waves on our Single Fin… Loving life to the fullest.
Broken Head & Tallows:
Sigh, so beautiful, so calm, so white, and almost no one to be seen. The blue sky is indistinguishable from the clear water of the ocean. Here and there you see some surfers in the sea, but not just surfers, eeek: also white sharks. We were told that since people started flying drones, so many sharks have been spotted. Well, no thanks, we didn’t go into the water here.
Whites Beach is an enchanting beautiful beach. Not the easiest beach to get to (read: twenty minutes of dirt road through the jungle), but really the most beautiful ever. You walk down the cliff for about ten minutes. A narrow path, plants everywhere, the shrill sound of crickets, until you reach a spot where you can see the whole bay. We look at it speechless, so captivating. The white sand, so fine, you can even hear a very high sound with every step you take. This is truly paradise. Once again, our island life wish was fulfilled: we spotted five dolphins playing in the waves. Our hearts burst with joy. What a gift. As tempting as it was to dive into the clear blue water, we stayed loyal to the shore, because white sharks are also spotted here daily.
After feeling the sand between our toes on almost every beach, we happily strolled through the village. We came across so many cute shops with brands we only know from online. Spell & The Gypsy Collective is one of them, as well as Arnhem Clothing, Yoli & Otis, and so on. Shopping fever to the max. Our absolute faves were really the shops with home decor items. Pampa, with the most beautiful rugs ever, all handmade in Argentina, Hope & May, we would have loved to buy all the island accessories they had, Pop & Scott, a store filled with beautiful hand-painted pots, and we also found our dream bedroom here. If only...
We could write for hours about everything we did, saw, and especially ate. Byron Bay has truly stolen our hearts, and we will definitely go back, and then happily with the four of us: completely together.
Wishing you all very happy holidays, and maybe we’ll run into you in Amsterdam.
Eve & Pris
xx
